But the tendency throughout the most recent period, during the extraordinary growth of the FIRE sector, has been against monopolization, has it not?
^^^ CB: My thought on this is that the increasing concentration of wealth in FIRE as a sector is monopolization or centralization. I realize this is not today's conventional definition of monopoly, but I think it is the way that Marx uses it below. Perhaps I should substitute "concentration of wealth" or " centralization" for "monopoly"; we might say that the big Wall Street corporations, FIRE, have cross-sectional "monopoly/oligopoly power, because so much wealth is concentrated in them.
In the recent bailout process, the Wall Street banks got an order of magnitude more money than General Motors.
I think in _Imperialism_ , Lenin uses the term "monopoly" as encompassing the financial oligarchy , and means that it has monopoly power over the whole economy, , cross-sectionally.
Notice how Marx uses "monopoly" and "centralization". Capitalists "expropriating" other capitalists, regardless of the content of their enterprises , is monopolization in Marx's usage:
"As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm